o 0= o p R T wo guys I wanted very much to like me are the Russian con- ceptual artists Vi tal y Komar and Alexander Melamid. Vitaly Komar is heavyset, with horn-rimmed glasses and dark Tar- tar curls and a smile sparked with gold den- tal work. At door- ways, with a brief and accurate bow he allows his companions to go first. He is a veteran of one year's service in the Soviet Army, where he painted signs and posters and hundreds of portrai ts of Nikita Khrushchev. Sometimes, for fun, he clasps his hands over his knit vest, fills his eyes with spurious warmth, and imi- tates a Russian policeman saying, "Dear citizens, hhhhhow can I hhhhhelp you?" His partner, Alexander Melamid (the two began working in collabora- tion in 1965), is thin, and stands with an athlete's slope. His hair and the frames of his glasses are thick and black; his hair looks slightly elec- trified. He is forty-one years old, and Komar is forty-three. When Melamid is calm, he keeps his hands in the pockets of his pants or of his tan rain- coat and gestures occasionally with his elbows. When he is excited, his hands fly from his pockets and fill the air, and his face is all mobility. In the pres- ence of a woman he considers ex- tremely beautiful, his eyes may shutter at the overload; he looks, he turns away, he puts one arm out to break his fall, he clutches at his heart. Shock is an emotion he registers in detail: "When we first emigrated to America, in 1978, I went to Times Square and I saw the movie 'Superman.' I thought it was just going to be about a big man. But when he started to fly! [Eye- brows shoot up.] When he made time reverse by flying so fast around the earth the other way! [Head jerks back.] My God! [Eyes widen.] In Russia, there is nothing like this-there is ) a F I PAR.TNER.S L f.< " Ow', .....-. .,..... Y"'_""'O/'. --- (. ý t t ..".,l " !. -g b "'-.I:.. :. .....-1 .......-:; t"' '" .... :>o... .;........... '\ r .t.. ...: { i \ ,, - > / ':S" <<.{ '.,., ^" "\ " -... 1!If -., nobody . . . [Hands beseech Heaven.] In Russia, we have never seen-in- credible! [Jaw falls to chest.]" KOMAR: Yes, and since that movie have been two more, "Superman II" and "Superman III." So now we are in America eight years, or three Supermen. Komar and Melamid have painted in classrooms in Moscow; in the streets of a village called Brodke, about two hundred miles from Mos- cow, where people stood watching them and spitting sunflower seeds; in apartments in the neighborhood of Moscow University; in a summer camp for children outside the city; in a studio in the Women's League for Is- rael building, on Ibn Gabirol Street, in Jerusalem, where the smell of their spray painting made the birds in the courtyard fall silent; and in an apart- ment on East Thirty-third Street, in New York. Today, Komar lives in that apartment, and Melamid lives with his wife of seventeen years and two children in Jersey City, and they work In a loft on Canal Street upstairs from a Chinese theatrical club. Often, they paint Stalin: Stalin by a red- draped desk smiling as he receives a book for revision from the muse of his- tory, Stalin peering through red cur- tains in the back window of a limou- L 33 o 0 o E 5 .if Y sine, Stalin seated at a red-plush-upholstered dressing table staring at himself in the mirror. Or they sculpt busts of Stalin, or paint themselves in red neckerchiefs and short pants blowing gold trumpets and saluting a bust of Stalin, or they sketch scenes in an unlikely Soviet bal- let, with Mikhail Ba- ryshnikov in a white marshal's uniform dancing the part of Stalin. (Komar: "Stalin and Barysh- nikov look much alike, you know, especially in eyes and eye- brows.") Or they paint a young couple making love standing up beneath a portrait of Stalin on the day his death was announced, or they paint Ronald Reagan as a centaur, or they paint two Bolsheviks with a red flag and a lan- tern examining a tiny dinosaur baring its teeth at them in the snow, or they photograph themselves in togas and lighted halos going on a descent into Hell, or they make a hypothetical American propaganda poster of a black man and a white man in tuxedos standing next to each other and smil- ing above the legend "Black and White, Brothers Forever," or (lately) they make multipanelled works on wood or big canvases, using oil paints, acrylics, pencil, colored inks, newspa- per scraps, aluminum bowls, New Coke bottles, working clocks, artificial flowers, and black plastic rats. Some people who view their work laugh out loud occasionally; others do not. At a group show in Brooklyn several years ago, a part-time radio-talk-show host and professed Trotskyite slashed their full-length, life-size portrait of Hitler, because, he said, he was "tired of irony." ................ 1 ?^- o '- }- , 'tf ' , j ) "-(; '" J "1 fI< ... ., I I ". '" '<1>." '" K OMAR: Alex and I met in morgue. It was at Institute for Physical Culture, in Moscow, where we went for anatomy drawing. MELAMID: We were born in the